Dana's View: What was so special?

Friday

The mighty presence to our east was in a particularly gleeful mood this morning.

Its surface was stippled with sparkles and sparsely dotted with small boats.

The surface was behaving itself quite decorously; just a gentle swell lifting the 15 or so widely scattered boats in a stately rhythm. Not a hint of its sometimes-violent nature troubled the scene.

Way out on the edge, what seemed like a white cottage floating along, resolved itself into a container ship plowing a stolid furrow in the placid surface. No decorous behavior here, just a leviathan, all but oblivious to the serene scene, heading south.

A couple of lobstermen were hauling their traps with the efficiency of motion only long hours at a task can bring. Up came the pots, a quick overhaul of the contents, a new bait bag, and back overboard it went, the small lobsters to grow some more, their larger brethren to a grimmer fate.

All the other small boats had one or two men fishing for the ‘prince of the tides’ the old linesider, Mr. Striped Bass himself.

Like most of the mobile species that occupy our summer clines, this fish understandably wants to stay with his food supply. Aware of the fattening bass and their predilection for the fat baitfish, the fishermen were dotting the ocean, were hoping to intercept one of these supreme masters of the surf.

I don’t fish as much as I once did, though now that I think of it, I don’t do much of anything as much as I once did, except for maybe, naps.

But not fishing as much, doesn’t mean I don’t have the interest. The interest is there, but looming all around this interest, are those Monomoy memories.

Old memories take on a patina of pleasure all out of proportion to their reality.

But when I reflect back on those halcyon years on that breathlessly beautiful Monomoy Island I find it hard to separate the pure pleasure of the events from those pleasurable memories, nor do I really want to.

There were the glorious nights, down on Point Rip - the full moon sitting up there in its ethereal surroundings, sending a golden/orange narrowing band of leftover sunshine across the ink black ocean to terminate at our feet.

A dorsal fin of what we used to call, ‘an old soaker’ of a fish, would occasionally be nudging our slowly swimming Atom plug, then taking the lure with an almighty whoosh. The struggle to bring the fish ashore or aboard was anti-climatic compared to the marvels we saw in those moonbeams.

Or the many nights we would cook a rudimentary dinner on the beach, waiting for the night to steal the light of the day. Then it was, stand in the surf’s edge for an hour or two, slowly congealing, to commune with the waves and the world, with the hope that maybe some bass hungrier than most might blunder into our lure.

But in those days, on those beaches, one thing I don’t remember thinking much about at all, was how lucky we were to be able to do these kinds of things. It was what we had always done.

Wasn’t good luck when something special happened? What was so special about driving a decrepit old car, no headlights, no fenders, no brakes, five or 10 miles down a deserted beach, standing on the edge of the continent, and saluting the surf with our surf rods?

Or again, what was so special about leaning against the old car on a pea soup foggy night, moisture beading our eyebrows and talking softly against the sibilant murmur of a dark and restless ocean?

Then, hearing the whoosh of a bass chasing bait in the shallow waters on top of Schooner Bar, casting our lures into the murk in an attempt to keep up the pretense of fishing while savoring the near overload of anticipatory sensations.

It seems to have taken some accumulated mileage for me to fully appreciate just where I have been and to be able to define what is now, so special. Growing up on Cape Cod was special; the added fillip of having Monomoy as an all but private playground was extra-special and I now know just how lucky I was.

So, when I look out on today’s friendly ocean and with half closed eyes and let the memories come flooding back I can appreciate the luck that landed me on this lovely peninsula, the luck that enabled us to play on the spectacular island off Chatham, the last generation to do so.

But that sparkling ocean is also sending another message. We are still, half a century later, basking in the glow of incredibly good fortune to be able to enjoy the beauty that surrounds all of us on our multi-faceted peninsula.

What was so special? All of it.

The memories are golden, so is the present.

Dana Eldridge a former teacher, is the author of three books, "Once Upon Cape Cod," "Cape Cod Lucky" and "A Cape Cod Kinship: Two Centuries, Two Wars, Two Men." He lives in Orleans. Dana’s View appears every other week.